Editor's note

VMware's mature hypervisor and extensive ecosystem of management tools make it a leader in the virtualization market. Over the past few years, the company's focus has been on the increasing popularity and demand for cloud platforms and containers.

Partnerships with AWS and Pivotal give users some insight into VMware's strategy. Essentially, it's a head-in-the-clouds, feet-on-the-ground approach. The AWS partnership enables admins to migrate workloads to the cloud and connect on-premises deployments to VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware is also aiming to integrate Pivotal Container Service with vSphere so admins can effectively use and manage containers and VMs in the same environment.

Updates to vSAN, and NSX especially, are also key to the company's strategy. Hyper-converged storage, software-defined networking and microsegmentation all help to ease workload management efforts and provide support for containerized applications.

Although new initiatives and updates to established products are announced all the time, the biggest news is usually reserved for VMware's annual user conference.

VMworld 2018 U.S. will take place Sunday, August 26th through Thursday, August 30th at the convention center at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. Check out our full coverage leading up to and during the event, including news from the show floor.